That is huge that she did that. Trudeau got big problems.

Lots of Liberals (and all Conservatives obviously) I know are calling for him to resign

My spidey sense must be way off, I keep thinking this can't really be THAT big a deal, but clearly I'm dead wrong given the countries reaction and this truly is a massive scandal.

Yeah that was my reaction as well. I feel like I'm missing something.

I don't get it either.

Trudeau must act and fast.. I don't want to see him resign but he needs to do something to stabilize and get things back on track for the election

I don't understand what's not to get.

A corporation that was about to go to court lobbied the government to a) create a law that would allow them to pay a fine instead of going to court and b) the government further pressured the court system to drop charges so the corporation could pay the fine instead of going to court. I know that the Trump administration does this **** every day but it's not normal. It's practically a textbook example of corruption.

Add the part where Trudeau pressured his AG over 10x to change her decision to help win elections in Quebec.

And when she didn't he practically canned her by shuffling her around elsewhere. So she quit and blew this up in his face.

The slow bleed drip is killing him right now. His poll numbers are tanking.

He might have to call a public inquiry to stop the bleed, but that opens a whooe new can of worms.

Add that the AG is the one cabinet post that operates independently and without interference from the prime minister's office. It is a non-partisan role tasked with oversight of federal prosecution designed to be able to act soley in the public interest without any political influence.

This is why Trudeau had no say in what happens to Meng Wanzhou. Whether or not to extradite her is under the purview of the Attorney General and is not subject to any political considerations (though I think she can make a final appeal to the Justice Minister before getting extradited).

Thanks for the info.

Add in the fact that when Canada detained the CEO's daughter from Huawei Trudeau said we must not interfere with the courts and the judicial system. Yet him and his staff did that.

Also the fact he is trying to protect Quebec jobs(which many doubt are in jeopardy) while 15,000 Albertan's have lost their jobs and Bills like C69 screw Alberta Jobs

I may be wrong but I feel Trudeau was in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Imagine Trudeau sitting there near the election time and SNC Lavalin declares a HQ move from Quebec to England. The amount of wrath Trudeau would incur would melt his voters in Quebec. No doubt the other parties would be using it against him politically.

The optics of Trudeau standing still and letting one of Quebec's multinationals leave the country, leave Quebec would not sit well in Quebec.

Trudeau tried strengthen his Quebec strong hold, but he stepped on a landmine and is now bleeding votes all over.

The only thing he could have done was fire his AG back in September when she came to this conclusion, WITHOUT trying to pressure her 10x to change her mind.

I thought they were tied in till 2025?

This would have been better as well but still would have bit him in the ars.

Question is does it cost him an election? Majority?

I still see Liberals doing quite well in Atlantic Canada and of coyrse Quebec.

They probably lose all 4 seats in Alberta and some in BC.

The only reason the Cons got a majority in 2011 was because NDP stole all the Liberal seats and that won't happen without Layton...Singh is terrible.

I think it a minority government either way but Libs can't bleed too much in Ontario

This is overstating things by quite a bit. The law in question mirrors practices in other countries, including the US and UK. No charges would be immediately dropped, that’s why it’s called a deferred prosecution. And the PM has certainly not broken any laws, as Andrew Scheer has been saying in bad faith.

I think this whole incident is absolutely problematic for the Liberals, as the coverup calls Trudeau’s leadership skills into question, but it’s not a scandal even remotely in the league of anything going on down south.

So are you very comfortable with this situation? You think that the PMO should be able to try to influence the AG? Will you be ok and comfortable if Scheer were to do the same thing for an Alberta oil company that is actively lobbying his PMO? RBC employs many tens of thousands more Canadians than SNC-Lavalin - if they are about to be charged under the criminal code, should they be allowed to buy a deferred prosecution from the governing party to protect their workers?

When the "best" defenses are that the charges aren't dropped immediately and that technically no laws were broken, the jig is up. It's clearly wrong. They should absolutely be crucified for this. Not to mention that the double dealing of making grand public declarations of openness/fairness/sunny ways while making backroom deals with well connected corporations that are facing charges. This is all completely indefensible. I'm not saying it's as bad as Trump's banana republic BS, but that insanity has desensitized people to this kind of thing. Trudeau is a fraud and he should go.

If there was any real influence, then SNG Lavalin would have their deferred prosecution agreement already. The PM is absolutely within his bounds to make his preference on the matter known, so long as the final decision rests with the AG. The AG made her decision, and it hasn’t been changed even when the AG was shuffled out. Everything else is a matter of perceived loyalties.

By "make his preference known" do you mean "attempt to press" Wilson-Raybould to intervene and then "put heavy pressure" on her to change her mind, because that's what I'm reading happened.

But her original decision still stands. If Trudeau wanted to put real pressure on JWB, that wouldn’t be the case.

Politicians play politics. Stuff like this happens in every government, to a lot greater degree than what we’re seeing here. Remember the long-form census? Same deal.

I don't believe this is accurate. The government is not supposed to pressure the AG one way or the other.

There's a good summary here:

http://www.ontariocourts.ca/coa/en/p...n_function.htm

I don't think there's any practical way we can accept that the PM can simply "make his preference known" that could be reasonably perceived as not attempting to influence the outcome. Note further that in this case a rationale held out by the government is that they weren't trying to influence the outcome for selfish reasons (heavens no, they wouldn't think of it!) they were merely trying to influence the outcome to protect the workers and vendors connected to SNC Lavalin. Trying to walk that back to actually, we weren't really trying influence anything at all, is not believable.

Do you want to guess what I think of the person responsible for the long-form census scandal? I'm not sure if I'm ready to put Trudeau in his league, but he's getting closer than I'm comfortable with. Same as it ever was, Liberals are like centrist Dems--complete disgraces who always turn into disasters--and yet so much better than the alternative. At least the Dems have a viable left-wing now unlike that NDP who couldn't get elected dogcatcher, so long live Trudeau I guess, may he reign for years to come.

You can't be serious. Failure at improper influence is not a sign that it wasn't improper.

Two wrongs make a right. Got it.

I might also add, if it was so reasonable and appropriate for the PM and his team to be making their views known about the matter, then a good deal more about what they were doing and saying would have been taking place in a public forum. And they wouldn't be so evasive about it when challenged.

Of course it was improper. It doesn’t rise to the level of scandalous, though. Not even close.

Unless, of course, there’s more to the story that we haven’t heard, and given Trudeau’s utter bungling of the response so far, I’m certainly not ruling that out.

I just really disagree with the idea of categorizing this as tolerable government activity. The implication would be that any company that is large enough would be free to violate the criminal code because it would be ok for them to subsequently lobby the government to pressure the AG to facilitate a DPA and fine. We really, really, really do not want to have a country where large corporations are above the law. Honestly, do large companies need more help from government than they're getting already?